How can I personalize cold emails for clients who lack online presence, like handyworkers, so the outreach doesn’t feel like an ad?
Treat the prospect as a fellow tradesperson—mention your own background in the same trade (e.g., ‘I’m a plumber’ or ‘I’m an underwater welder’) to create shared experience and familiarity. This light personalization works better than a generic cold email and serves as a solid fallback when you lack specific details. You can also use a ‘cold read’ approach, disclosing intimate familiarity or referencing a shared group, which boosts influence and reply rates.
The creator outlines a straightforward investor outreach process: first build a list of target investors in the relevant niche (e.g., ad tech). For each investor, use a tool like Perplexity or an OpenAI web search to find their last 10 investments and a brief summary of who they are. Use that information to personalize a cold email—reference a recent investment, explain why it was strategic, note that you’re now working with a company that fits their thesis, and offer to share a pitch deck or more details. He also suggests pulling the investor list into LinkedIn to find mutual connections and request intros, but notes that this takes longer. Because investors see many deals daily, he prefers a one‑shot approach: send the personalized email, collect the positive responses, remove those leads, and then optionally follow up with a more nuanced connection request on the remaining prospects.
Cold email is definitely getting harder overall, but the top performers continue to succeed. There’s a pendulum effect: as low‑effort spam gets filtered out, the field opens up for skilled practitioners, which temporarily raises viability. Over the long term the trend is toward increased difficulty, though there are short‑term spikes where effectiveness rises again.
You don't need money to do cold outreach; everyone has a free mailbox (email). You just need to figure out the email address and be willing to trade some time for potential money. As a beginner with time but little money, you can manually write and send cold emails—each taking 3–4 minutes, allowing 10–20 per day, which is less than an eighth of a typical workday. Tools aren't required; they only speed up a process that's already potentially profitable. You can also send cold DMs via Loom video on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Cold calls are far less efficient than cold emails these days. Roughly only 10% of the effort you put into calling translates into real results because many leads never answer, you often talk to gatekeepers, and even qualified prospects are frequently busy or uninterested. In contrast, a cold email campaign can reach thousands of leads, pre‑qualify them, and give you a list of warm prospects before you ever pick up the phone. Cold calls can still have a place, but they’re much more manual and low‑yield compared to email outreach.